Almost a decade ago, Tom Nichols warned that Americans were losing respect for expertise. He didn’t expect things to get this bad.
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Sean talks with Nichols about his 2017 book “The Death of Expertise” and what’s happened since: why people don’t just distrust experts but actively push back against them, how the internet turns bad ideas into communities, and why a society that can’t agree on basic facts can’t function for long. They also dig into the deeper causes: loneliness, narcissism, and the weird psychology of living in a world where everything “just works.”
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)
Guest: Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom)
00:00 Intro
01:13 A Growing Contempt for Competence: Revisiting The Death of Expertise
08:14 Decadence and the collapse of respect for competence
18:07 How internet echo chambers destroys shared reality
21:59 Is the ruling class to blame for the death of expertise?
28:34 How to separate healthy skepticism from destructive contempt for expertise
35:04 What happens next in a post-expertise world?
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